Our memories are the essence of who we are. The skills we have acquired, the knowledge we have amassed, and the personal experiences we have had define us as individuals. The overarching goal of work in the Preston Lab is to understand and manipulate the neural mechanisms that support learning and memory in the human brain. Our research focuses primarily on how interactions between the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex promote formation of new knowledge. In addition to exploring how hippocampal—prefrontal networks function in adulthood, we are interested in how development of these structures through childhood and adolescence supports not only gains in memory, but also underlies improvements in problem solving, creativity, reasoning, and planning abilities during development. To address the core questions of our research program, the lab employs a number of techniques on the leading edge of human neuroscience, including high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), neurostimulation, intracranial recordings in human patients, and computational modeling. These techniques provide unprecedented leverage to determine not only where particular cognitive processes are instantiated in the brain, but also the precise nature of the representations and computations that give rise to them.